Google announced a significant change to their Ad Rank system, which is used to determine where and how ads from the AdWords network are displayed. The Ad Rank system is designed to help pick the best ads for each spot, and display them in the format where they are likely to get the most clicks. This, of course, is a benefit to Google because they will get more revenue from higher number of ad clicks. It is also a benefit to advertisers who will get more visitors to their site, and in many cases, the visitors will be more targeted and hopefully better converting.
The update specifically focuses on the extensions and formatting of the ads being displayed. For example, if you run a local oil change company, and you’re using AdWords to bring in customers, you’ll have several different extensions and formats of your advertisement. If someone does a search from a smart phone for ‘oil change’ your ad may come up with an option to display driving directions to the company, the store hours, or a phone number to call it. If that same person does the same search from a desktop computer, it may display customer rating and reviews instead.
The idea is to target searchers based on where they are, and what they are doing in order to get the best possible results. Those performing a search from a smart phone just down the street will respond better to one type of ad, compared to those searching from home.
These changes will only affect those who have set up multiple ad formats and extensions. This will likely encourage many more advertisers to take advantage of these options from within AdWords. Using the Quality Score system from within Google AdWords, marketers should be able to create ads which Google believes will be very effective not only at generating clicks, but also converting into sales.
At this point, the updates will only affect ads displayed in Google’s search results pages. They have not commented on whether or not this will roll out to ads displayed on other websites using Google’s AdSense program.
